Just read the New Yorker Denton profile. It’s not...

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Just read the New Yorker Denton profile. It’s not bad, but it’s kind of weird. It spends a lot of time talking about how scandalous (or non-scandalous) Gawker is and ends up feeling like a CJR piece wrapped in anecdotes about Nick’s various Asperger’s-y moments. A) I don’t think anyone really finds Gawker scandalous anymore, and B) it’s not an interesting discussion, especially when it’s not the only outlet that traffics in scandal at this point. It’s a discussion that would have been had (and was) in 2004 or so.

What’s interesting about Gawker now is that it’s become part of the establishment in a way, and is either (depending on who you talk to) a viable innovative business and the future of all media, or an outlier that happens to dominate a specific part of the media industry by virtue of getting there first. If it’s the former, it’s useful to know what can and should be replicated. If it’s the latter, you’d want to know what’s going to keep it from going stale and how will it expand and grow in the future, especially if Nick did sell it.

(I’ve always maintained that Nick would only sell if he had something sexier waiting in the wings. He doesn’t need the exit, and to date, Gawker Media has turned out to be more interesting than anyone—including Nick—expected it would be. So what’s the big idea that tops Gawker? Or is there one?)

That said, I did particularly enjoy this part:

“The villain public persona is not a hundred-per-cent true,” A. J. Daulerio, the editor-in-chief of Deadspin, Gawker Media’s sports blog, said. “It’s probably eighty-per-cent true.”

“He has fun when people say horrible things about him,” the blog guru Anil Dash said.

“I can’t lie to make him worse than he is, but he’s pretty bad,” Ian Spiegelman, a former Gawker writer, said.

“Other people’s emotions are alien to him,” Choire Sicha, another Gawker alumnus, said.

“He’s got a strong carapace of not really thinking other people’s opinions are that important,” John Gapper, a columnist at the Financial Times, said.

“He’s right,” Matt Welch, the editor of the libertarian magazine Reason, said. “He’s never right about me, of course. But people are lazy and not very good.”

“He almost sees people as Legos moving around,” Sheila McClear said.

“He’s not a fully human person,” Spiegelman said.

“I mean, maybe he thinks he’s the one truly advanced human,” Anna Holmes, the founding editor of Jezebel, a.k.a. Girlie Gawker, said.

“Does he have parents?” Daulerio asked.